God Help The Child

Part 3 is from the perspective of Booker and is told in third person. The section opens with Booker’s assault on a man he has caught masturbating at a children’s playground on the grounds of the college Booker attends. Booker goes to a lecture. Booker is a graduate student in economics, having abandoned other fields because they failed to examine the true roots of oppression, racism, and white supremacy—money and greed. Booker has planned to write about his grand theory in a book with the title The Cross and the Vault.

Booker’s mind wanders during the lecture. He thinks about his childhood and his bookish family. The only media they had was a radio, records, and the newspaper, so Booker feels out of step with his media-obsessed peers. Every Saturday, after a week of thin meals, Mrs. Stabern would cook up a feast and all the children would line up to tell their father what they had learned that week and share their problems for the family to solve. The only gap in this ritual was the months when the eldest Stabern sibling, Adam, was missing. Adam’s body, stowed in a culvert, turned up that spring, and Booker had gone with his father to identify the remains.

Booker felt incomplete without Adam, who was two years his elder. Booker was actually a twin. His twin had been stillborn, and Adam had come to fill the place of his twin. Booker’s last sight of Adam was of the boy wearing a yellow shirt and skating down the street at dusk. The Stabern family, including Booker’s rich maternal grandfather and Booker’s aunt, Queen, had shown up for the closed-coffin funeral for Adam. Queen had told Booker to hold on to Adam as long as he needed to, until he was ready to let go of him. The rest of the family disliked Booker’s refusal to move on, however. Meanwhile, Mr. Stabern resumed playing his records and took up the Saturday ritual again. Booker learned to play the trumpet and was a competent player.

Six years after Adam’s death, when Booker was 14, the police finally caught Adam’s murderer, Mr. Humboldt. The man, an unassuming mechanic with a large van, had lured a total of six little boys into his vans with a cute dog. He then sexually assaulted, tortured, and killed them. He collected the penises of his victims in a tin and had the name of each victim tattooed on his body. The trial was a media circus, and Booker was disturbed by the public consumption of his brother’s death. Booker finally hit upon a way to mark the death: he had a small yellow rose tattooed on his shoulder when he was 16.

Booker left for college, and the first two years were distraction enough until he discovered how boring and lacking in creativity his classmates were. No one thought deeply and critically about anything. Booker was unsure of what was true and felt overwhelmed by despair. He channeled his cynicism into a thesis topic—how wealth circulates and corrupts. At the family dinner to celebrate his master’s degree, Booker lost it when he realized Adam’s things had been packed away. When he proposed starting a foundation and scholarship in Adam’s name, Mr. Stabern argued that it was a waste of money, and the other siblings just saw Booker as manipulative and arrogant now that he had his degrees. Exhausted by his son’s behavior, Mr. Stabern gave an ultimatum—be civil or get out. Booker chose to leave.

He stayed with his girlfriend Felicity for a while and got a gig as a trumpet player and sometimes played on the streets. Their break-up came the night after Booker was arrested for beating up two crackheads who were lighting up while their toddler cried in the back seat. Felicity told Booker that he was no superhero and should stop getting involved in other people’s business. Like Felicity’s, Booker’s work was infrequent—not enough to live on alone, in any event—and his trumpet playing was too average to earn a living.

Fortunately for Booker, he received an inheritance from his grandfather, who had died and left everything to the Stabern children. The man had been a slumlord, so Booker simply ignored the fact that this was the dirty wealth he had studied in college. Booker got himself a room and played his trumpet in the streets. He had just gotten the inheritance when he saw Bride one night as she stepped from a limousine. He saw her as “a midnight Galatea” (132), and the idea of her satisfied something in him that had been missing since Adam’s death. He saw her again one night at a jazz concert and impulsively grabbed her. When he learned her name was Bride, he was overwhelmed.

Their sex was satisfying to Booker, and he liked that she seemed completely uninterested in his life. She was perfect, beautiful, and when he held her, it was like owning the night. She amused him, and he did not care that there was not one book in her apartment. Occasionally, when she shared stories of her painful childhood, he saw another part of her and comforted her. They were two people with no tight family connections, and he liked it that way. It all fell apart after six months, and “Booker ran away” (135).